This country would be such a different and better place if we had a responsible news media. Yesterday, the FBI announced what appears to be a dubiously based re-opening of the Clinton e-mail investigation. The problem is, that from what information that is available, the e-mails at the root of the "new" story are not even those of Clinton herself. One very politically involved friend summarized the situation as follows:

So, here are a few things to keep in mind from news
reports right now about FBI Director Comey and the "emails":
1) The e-mails Comey announced today were NOT originally withheld by Clinton or
campaign (source: NBC)
2) Newly discovered emails related to Clinton investigation did not come from
her private server (source: AP)
3) The e-mails mentioned in Comey's letter were discovered "on another
device" tied to an unrelated case (source: NBC)
4) The emails were discovered during the FBI's
inquiry into Anthony Weiner's sexting (source: New York Times)To me, it all seems like an overtly political move today.And none of it suggests it has anything to do with
Hillary Clinton directly!!!

A piece in Salon further supports this reasoning. Here are highlights:

The emails that
the FBI are looking into did not come from Hillary Clinton’s private
server.

The emails in
question, according to the New York Times,
came from seized electronic devices belonging to Anthony Weiner and
his recently estranged wife, Huma Abedin.

NBC’s Pete
Williams reported late Friday that the newly discovered emails the FBI teased in a
letter came from a “device” involved in a separate investigation.

Williams
appeared on MSNBC to give an update on what his sources were telling him.

“What they say
is that in the course of a separate investigation, they came across a device
— they won’t say whether it is a computer or cell phone, but that it’s
some device — and that in looking at that, that led them to some
other emails,” Williams said. “But they are not emails from Hillary
Clinton.”

“It
doesn’t appear that the campaign, or the Clintons, or the State Department, had
emails that they didn’t give to the FBI,” William said.

When
FBI director James Comey announced the investigation in a letter, political
commentators were already speculating how much damage this would cause the
Clinton campaign. And because Comey’s letter was light on details, conjecture
and guesswork dominated the cable news networks.

But as new
details come forward, it appears this newest development is much to do
about nothing. The AP recently corroborated Williams’ reporting,
writing in a tweet that the emails “did not come from [Clinton’s] private
server.”Clinton campaign
chair John Podesta released a statement in response to the FBI letter,
requesting Comey to provide any and all information he has related to the
latest inquiry. “The Director owes it to the American people to immediately
provide the full details of what he is now examining,” the statement read. “We
are confident this will not produce any conclusions different form the once the
FBI reached in July.”

Comey seems more worried about covering his ass than getting to the truth or avoiding the misleading of Americans. Regardless of who wins on November 8, 2016, Comey needs to go.

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory who prostituted himself to Right wing Christian by signing HB2 continues to get pummeled for the damage he has done to North Carolina's economy. Now, the Charlotte Observer reports on how the Roanoke Times of Roanoke, Virginia, endorsed McCrory for all the economic good he has done for Virginia and the Roanoke area in particular. As I have said many times, bigotry does have its price as does social backwardness - think Gloucester County, Virginia - when communities are vying to attract good paying jobs. Progressive businesses do not want to locate in areas defined by discrimination. Here are highlights from the Observer:

Which
candidate would do the most to help our local economy? That’s easy. It’s Pat
McCrory, the Republican governor of North Carolina, who’s seeking his second
four-year term in the November election. We can point to specific and multiple
ways he has helped the economy – our economy. North Carolina
panicked and made a spectacle of itself by passing HB2, its so-called “bathroom
bill.” In response, various companies and even sports leagues pulled events
from the state. Three of those have wound up in Salem — the NCAA Division III
men’s and women’s soccer championships, as well as the Division II Central
Intercollegiate Athletic Association football championship. That’s money in the
bank for us.

McCrory
has given Virginia a competitive advantage in economic development, as well.
When the University Economic Development Association recently held its national
conference in Roanoke, the keynote speaker highlighted a North Carolina program
to encourage partnerships between colleges and companies, as a way help recruit
technology companies interested in research and development. The speaker hailed
it as a model for other states to follow as they try to build a “knowledge
economy.” Then the speaker noted that McCrory had cancelled it. The
pro-business audience groaned.

On
Monday, a data company picked Richmond as the site for a new office, with 730
jobs. Industry officials said it beat out Charlotte specifically because of
HB2.

Feel
free to argue all you want which presidential candidate would be best, but it’s
clear that Virginia would be best served if North Carolina re-elected McCrory.

An understaffed U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to take the appeal of the spineless and bigoted Gloucester County School Board from the ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth that struck down the school board ruling denying gender identity appropriate bathroom use to high school student, Gavin Grimm. With the evenly split court, the ruling when it comes could be a tie and leave the lower court ruling as the binding law for the states within the 4th Circuit (which include North Carolina) while leaving the law unsettled across the rest of the nation. One can only hope that a majority of the justices will rule in favor of Grimm and transgender individuals across the nation. It should also be noted that notwithstanding lies disseminated by Christofascist organizations (including the disingenuously named and stridently anti-LGBT Alliance Defending Freedom), there are ZERO instances of inappropriate behavior by transgender individuals in restrooms. The same cannot be said for Republican elected officials. Here are highlights from the Washington Post.

The Supreme
Court said Friday that it will decide whether the Obama administration may
require public school systems to let transgender students use bathrooms that
align with their gender identity, putting the court once again at the center of
a divisive social issue.

School districts across the country are split on how to
accommodate transgender students amid conflicting guidance from courts, the
federal government and, in some cases, state legislatures that have passed laws
requiring people to use public restrooms that match the sex on their birth
certificates.

The justices accepted a petition from the School Board of
Gloucester County, Va., seeking to overturn a lower court’s order that
17-year-old Gavin Grimm, who was born female but identifies as male, be allowed
to use the boys’ restroom during his senior year of high school.

It is the most
high-profile case the eight-member court has accepted since the death of
Justice Antonin Scalia in February. The case will not be heard until next year,
and it is unclear whether Scalia’s seat will be filled by then.

In an interview Friday, Grimm said it was unfair that he will
continue to be barred from the boys’ bathroom at Gloucester High until the case
is decided. He said he tries to avoid going to the bathroom altogether at
school but uses the nurse’s bathroom when necessary.

Grimm, referred
to as G.G. in court papers, came out as a transgender boy in his freshman year
of high school and, as a result of hormone therapy, has a deep voice and facial
hair, his lawyers told the court.

“We’re prepared to make our case to the court and to make
sure the Supreme Court and people in general see Gavin as who he is and see
trans kids across the country for who they are,” said Grimm’s attorney, Joshua
Block of the American Civil Liberties Union. Grimm “is not trying to dismantle
sex-segregated restrooms. He’s just trying to use them.”

The U.S. Court
of Appeals for the 4th Circuit sided with him in April, ruling that his case
could move forward. It deferred to the Obama administration’s position that
Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in public schools,
protects the rights of transgender students to use school bathrooms that align
with their gender identity.A month after the 4th Circuit decision, the U.S. Education
Department issued that same guidance to the rest of the nation’s public
schools.

The
petition said the case provides the court an opportunity to reexamine a 1997
precedent,Auer v. Robbins, that affords deference to an agency’s
interpretation of its regulations. It has been criticized by several
conservative justices, but the court earlier this year turned down a chance to
revisit it and did the same in accepting the Gloucester case.

“This
is one of the most important days in the history of the transgender movement,”
Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said
in a statement. “Whatever the court rules . . . may ensure that transgender
people are accepted and included as equal members of our society, or it may
relegate them to outsiders for decades to come.”

Remember that the entire issue arose in Gloucester County because of the insistence of a group of rabble rousing Christofascists who seek to inflict their belief system on all citizens. It their view, only they have rights and everyone else must defer to their beliefs. They represent, in my view, a toxic cancer on society.

For a political party that once prided itself as being thoughtful, respectful of knowledge and science, and tethered to objective reality, today's Republican Party has descended into something akin to a lunatic asylum or a crowd of zombies from the walking dead. Leading the way in this celebration of ignorance and bigotry are hypocrites like Paul Ryan, Jason Chaffetz, and a host of others. At the top of the party, is the narcissistic egomaniac named Donald Trump who would make P.T. Barnum blush when it comes to peddling the outlandish and untrue. Most frightening of all is that I see no way for the GOP to throw off the insanity and bigotry that now define it. At least not until the Christofascists, know nothings, and white supremacist are driven from the fold, and that simply is not going to happen. A column in Salon looks at this state of affairs. Here are excerpts:

Let’s congratulate Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT). He made news twice on
the same day. First there was his Wednesday announcement that, as Chairman of
the House Government Oversight Committee, he or someone on his staff has pulled
enough bullshit links about Hillary Clinton from right-wing websites to keep
them busyinvestigating her
administrationfor at
least two years and more likely for the length of however many terms she serves
as president.

Later Wednesday, Chaffetz
tweeted that even though just three weeks ago he pulled his endorsement of
Donald Trump over the latter’s infamous “grab ‘em by the pussy” comments, he is
still going tovote for the nominee.
And so Chaffetz becomes the latest member of the GOP’s “Vote for Him but
Don’t Support or Endorse Him” caucus, made up of Republican lawmakers whoprofess horrorthat their party nominated for
president a racist, misogynistic demagogue but will nonethelesscast their vote for himon November 8 because Hillary Clinton
is somehow worse.

It has become fashionable todeclare the Republican
Party deador at least
in a deep coma with little hope of recovery. The civil war now between
Trumpism, as represented by thewhite ethno-nationalistsbehind Trump’s campaign, and the
#NeverTrump crowd that includes thereformiconsand the “intellectual” wing of the
GOP, is at its roots a battle between two packs of hyenas over which one
gets to pick the corpse’s bones clean.

Chaffetz’s actions this week,
though, brought to mind another metaphor. The GOP is a zombie party, shambling
across the countryside, spreading terror and devouring any living creature it
comes across. There is no hope of reversing the condition. But unlike in, say,
“The Walking Dead” or a George Romero movie, you can’t kill it forever by
planting an ax in its head.

And unfortunately, because the
GOP zombie cannot be killed, we are going to be stuck working our lives around
it for the indefinite future.

Normally a major American political party functions as a
coalition of disparate interests, all united under one banner for the purpose
of achieving power and advancing interests. This has been true even in the
Republican Party despite its growing ever more conservative over the years and
driving its last liberal members out.

[T]he party has broken apart into warring factions.
The Trumpist wing has access to and control over much of the party’svaluable voter data. Some of the true believers in
conservatism as a political philosophy are talking aboutbreaking awaywith independent candidateEvan McMullinand
forming a new, true conservative party. Neo-conservatives like Bill Kristol
have not yet figured out what to do.

The problem, as Chaffetz’s
announcements this week show, is that despite all the divisions in the GOP,
despite it being at this point not much more than a bunch of mailing lists and
a scream reflex every time it hears the name “Clinton,” the party is still
going to hold a significant amount of power in American politics.

And what is it telling the voters it will use all
that power for? Non-stop investigations of the Clinton administration. Refusing
to vote on a new Supreme Court justice to replace Antonin Scalia. Probably some
Obamacare repeal votes and new efforts at suppressing the vote for minorities
that overwhelmingly support Democrats.

What the GOP will not be doing
is anything resembling governing. Like the zombie herds that are forever
chasing humans across the landscape of “The Walking Dead,” it will amble along
in a brainless rage, mindlessly attacking and attempting to devour any living
creature that crosses its path. It will have no purpose beyond that. Any member
of the party who has not become fully zombified will find himself chased down, bitten,
and reborn as a sentient corpse, wandering the land looking for a member of the
Clinton administration to subpoena.

As noted before, the husband and I are lucky enough to know Gavin Grimm and have hosted him in our home. It is difficult to describe this articulate and thoughtful young man as anything short of amazing. The same holds for his parents, especially his mother Deirdra, who have stood by their child unlike so many "godly Christians" who have thrown out their LGBT children as if they are inferior and akin to garbage. It is also telling that Gavin's entire saga and the legal battle that now may be heard before the United States Supreme Court, in my opinion, stems solely from the desire of Christofascists in Gloucester County who seek to punish Gavin - indeed, anyone who is LGBT - for failing to adhere to their poisonous religious beliefs and ignorant views on gender. Gavin has a column in the Washington Post that explains his saga, but also notes the thing missed and/or ignored by the self-congratulatory "godly folk" - we are all just people, created by god, nature or whatever deity one believes in, who did not choose who we are. The self-satisfied and falsely pious crowd forget that they had NO role in deciding if they would be born white or black, Christian or Muslim, gay or straight or, like Gavin, transgender. Here are to me the telling excerpts from Gavin's op-ed:

If you told me
two years ago that the Supreme Court was going to have to approvewhether I could use the school
restroom, I would have thought you were joking.

I was using
men’s restrooms in restaurants and shopping malls, so I told the principal I
would like to use the boys’ restrooms at school, too. I thought then, perhaps
naively, that this common-sense “issue” would be resolved quietly and
privately, as it should have been.

If only. Even though I used the restrooms for almost two
months without any disturbance, a group of parents and community members heard
that “a girl” was using the boys’ restroom and began complaining. Instead of
supporting me and the decision of the school administrators, the school board
convened two public meetings, inviting the community to discuss my genitals and
restroom usage in front of reporters and television cameras.

What keeps me
going is the knowledge that I am not the only transgender student out there,
and I have the chance to make things better so other transgender kids do not
have to go through what I am going through. With each step, my potential for
positive impact has increased. First within my school district. Then within the
federal courts, where a U.S. District Court ruling in my favor wasstayed by the Supreme Courtwhile it considers whether to take my
case. And now potentially across the nation, depending on what the Supreme
Court justices decide to do.

I did not choose to announce to the news media that I am
transgender. My school board made that decision for me. But now that I am
visible, I want to use my position to help the country see transgender people
like me as real people just living our lives. We are not perverse. We are not
broken. We are not sick. We are not freaks. We cannot change who we are. Our gender
identities are as innate as anyone else’s.

If the Supreme Court does take up my case, I hope the
justices can see me and the rest of the transgender community for who we are —
just people — and rule accordingly.

In prior posts, I have identified the two-bit pastor who I believe put the entire issue into motion. Like many of his ilk, he has no respect for the religious freedom rights of others and seeks to punish anyone who rejects his ignorance and bigotry based beliefs. What I find so disturbing is that gutless and spineless elected officials continue to give deference to such people and their beliefs. And as a side note, remember that if one scratches the surface of most of the leading :"family values" groups, you find a white supremacist lurking beneath the surface. These are not nice and decent people. The sooner society as a whole recognizes this reality, the better off we will be as a nation.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

For years now I have argued that no self-respecting gay individual could be a Republican unless they were (i) greed driven and obsessed with not paying taxes, (ii) openly racist, or (iii) suffering from deep seated internalized homophobia. Now, a similar argument can be made about women who remain in and/or support GOP notwithstanding all of the anti-woman Republicans starting with Donald Trump and ranging to all of his male apologists. To Trump and his male defenders, women are merely an object to be possessed and used by men. They are second class citizens who some in the far right would like to even see disenfranchised, a sentiment that will increase if women overwhelmingly support Hillary Clinton on November 8, 2016. It is one thing to admire a woman's beauty - or a man's beauty as in this blog's male beauty posts - and something far different and uglier to see them merely as victims to be grabbed and assaulted at will to gratify a male's pathetic ego. A piece in the New York Times looks at how many women in the GOP may be about to finally say "enough!" Here are highlights:

Donald
J. Trump has polarized men and women, with the sexes parting ways to
such a degree that Election Day could produce the biggest gender gap in
decades.

And now that division is
being amplified by a gender war in the Republican
Party itself. Men and women are taking sides over accusations of Mr.
Trump’s mistreatment of women, with the latest controversy a blistering exchange between Newt Gingrich
and Megyn Kelly of Fox News.

Increasing numbers of
Republican women have turned on their party’s male leaders for defending Mr.
Trump against accusations that he groped or forcibly kissed more than 10 women.
Many are complaining publicly that for years, they stood up for the party
against Democrats who accused it of pursuing a “war on women.” They are unable
to do so any longer, they say, and they see hypocrisy in Republican men
rallying behind Mr. Trump after the same leaders for years accused former
President Bill Clinton of predatory behavior.

“These are spineless men,”
said Brittany Pounders, a Republican activist and political blogger from
Houston.

The latest CBS News poll,
released last week, found that Hillary Clinton held a 19-percentage-point lead
over Mr. Trump among women likely to vote. Among Republican women, 79 percent
supported Mr. Trump. That was far below the 93 percent of Republican women who
voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.

Republican strategists with an expertise in reaching women are anxious
that Mr. Trump’s candidacy will damage the party’s ability to appeal to them
for years to come.

“I
think we’ll see a lot of women walk away from the party over this,” said Katie
Packer, who was Mr. Romney’s deputy campaign manager. “What you’re seeing is 20
years, 30 years of frustration coming together and really, really compounded in
the last couple of weeks.”

“Men on our team don’t get how serious this is,” she said. “I think
we’re all kind of disgusted that they don’t get that.”

In regions of battleground
states with many college-educated Republican women, such as Northern Virginia
and the Philadelphia suburbs, Mr. Trump is in peril with these voters long
loyal to the party.

Some Republican women are now openly organizing to support Mrs.
Clinton. “Being a Republican woman is
very different from being a Democratic woman,” said Jennifer Pierotti Lim, who
leads a group called Republican Women for Hillary. “This sentiment that Newt
Gingrich was speaking to — if you’re a woman, you shouldn’t be offended by
these things, you just should think about the issues — that’s pervasive.”

One of them is Wendy Lynn Day, who was pushed out of a leadership role
at the Michigan Republican Party last week after refusing to endorse Mr. Trump.
She criticized her party’s male leaders, saying that in past years, they had
proclaimed that morality and character mattered in a president, but that they
were ignoring that principle when it came to Mr. Trump.

“When we stood up and voiced
our concerns about Bill Clinton taking advantage of a young intern and
allegedly abusing all of those women, we were standing on the moral high
ground,” Ms. Day said. “We gave away some of that moral high ground by the way
we treated the women who’ve come forward with allegations about Donald Trump.”

“When your leaders come out
and make excuses and use biblical analogies to defend and promote Donald
Trump,” she added, “that to me crosses a line I’m not comfortable with.”

As many news outlets have reported, including The Guardian, the Vatican has sought to ban Catholics who choose to be cremated from having their ashes scattered or kept in family homes in urns, etc. A blogger friend, Tony Adams who is a former Catholic priest who once served at the Vatican gets to the heart of what truly motivates this move, and its not points of theology:

Want to know why the Catholic Church is mandating that
cremated remains be placed in a consecrated cemetery? When I was a brand new
assistant pastor of a Connecticut parish, my pastor advised me to choose a
parish that owned a cemetery when it came time for me to become the pastor of
my own parish. He said cemeteries are huge money-makers.Current increase in
cremation and private disposition of ashes cuts off a revenue stream that the
Catholic Church has enjoyed for ages. It's always about the money.

Money - and the power to control the lives of others - have always been the true twin gods of the Vatican and the Catholic Church hierarchy. One of the many reasons I left Catholicism.

In less than two weeks, Democrats and decent minded people have an opportunity to send a loud and clear message of what America is really about and what our values consist of. Yes, Donald Trump needs to be sent to an ignominious defeat, but so too must many Republican office holders who have been complicit in his misogyny through either their endorsements of the man or by their refusal to condemn both Trump and his policies of hate and division, not to mention his crude mindset that celebrates the sexual assault of women by disgusting men like himself. This is election is an opportunity to stand up for morality and decency, something utterly lacking in Donald Trump and in those who have put their political party ahead of the nation and the morality that Republicans falsely claim to uphold. Those without the moral courage to condemn Trump and/or who continue to endorse him need to be sent into political retirement. A column in the Washington Post makes this case:

It is a message
Democrats will be sending in suburban precincts all over the United States
during the 2016 campaign’s final days: Defeating Donald Trump isn’t enough.
Fully rejecting Trumpism also means routing Republican House and Senate
candidates who showed any ambivalence in pushing back against a nominee that so
many upscale voters regard with horror.

Rudra Kapila, a Democratic organizer, explained the mission .
. . . “is to get folks to vote Democrat down the ballot.”

It’s an objective that really matters in Virginia’s 10th
Congressional District, where Republican incumbent Barbara Comstock faces
Democrat LuAnn Bennett in one of the most closely contested House races in the
country. If Democrats are to have any chance of gaining the 30 seats they
need to take over the House — a long shot still — they have to win in places
like this, where Hillary Clinton is expected to enjoy large margins.

Comstock, a
staunch conservative and longtime Clinton critic, is well aware that Trump is
poison for many of her constituents. . . . . it took Comstock far too
long to get to that point [of denouncing Trump]. “My question to her is: Where
have you been? Why now and not before?” Bennett said in an interview after she
greeted the volunteers. “She has been one of the many, many enablers of Donald
Trump. She spent most of this presidential campaign dancing on the head of a
pin.”

Many vulnerable suburban Republican candidates have waltzed
around Trump because they need votes both from his supporters and also from
independents and Republicans who loathe him.

Many of the more
rural and working-class districts that were friendly to Democrats when the
party took back the House in 2006 are now reliably Republican. Democrats have
moved their hopes up the class scale and further into the suburbs.

By making even
more highly educated, metropolitan and ethnically heterogeneous seats
competitive, Trump is speeding up a political transition that was already
underway. It will be a problem for Republicans in the longer run, even if they
hang on to the House this year, as a more diverse electorate and a new
generation that is primarily moderate or progressive comes to predominate in
more districts.

The Trump effect hasalready
improved the Democrats’ chancesof
taking the Senate. In the House, they are now on track to add about a dozen
seats, and pickups in the high teens or low 20s are quite possible.

Virginia’s
Bennett sees Trump creating a “lose-lose” situation for her opponent. That’s
why she and scores of other Democrats will not let voters forget the name that
sits, like a very heavy weight, at the top of the Republican ticket.

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

On Friday afternoon the husband and I and several friends are setting sail on the Carnival Sunshine (pictured above) on a cruise out of Norfolk to Nassau, the Dominican Republic and Grand Turk before returning to Norfolk eight days later. As seems to be the norm when we travel, we are engaged in frenzied preparations, both at work and on the home front to be ready for what we hope will be a relaxing trip. At work, as seems always to be the case, I am working to complete work and put out fires. Naturally, I will have my laptop with me and be checking office e-mail regularly.

At home, we had to find a new house sitter to stay at our home and babysit the two dogs. Unlike in 2013, we will not be holding a political fundraiser at our home the day before we sail (we held an event for Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring in 2013).

As I have done in the past, I will be posting about our trip and my views on news events and all things gay. Posting frequency may well be reduced.

I write often about the ugly elements of the political and religious right here in America who seek to overthrow constitutional government in favor of either a strong man dictatorship or a Christian theocracy. Sadly, they have historical precedents from the past in other countries. One that springs immediately to mind is Germany. Germany in the late 1920's and early 1930's when far too many Germans put a restoration of perceived past national glory and bygone era ahead of democracy and true morality. The consequences for Germany and the world were horrific. Yet, as The New Republic reports, more and more Republicans and others on the right are seemingly longing to throw away democracy and/or strip others of voting rights. Some even hold up Vladimir Putin as an exemplary leader. It is frightening phenomenon and underscores the growing desperation and radicalism of today's American right wing. Here are highlights:

The
single most ominous thing that Donald Trump said in all three presidential
debates was a misguided attempt at a quip: “I’ll keep you
in suspense, okay?” Moderator Chris Wallace, of course, had posed what would
normally be the ultimate softball question for any presidential candidate:
Would he accept the results of the election? And even after all his rhetoric
about the “rigged” election, even with his increasingly urgent warnings about
voter fraud, Trump’s answer came as a jolt. Because it happened in a debate,
not during one of his rabble-rousing rallies, it felt like an official
declaration that the GOP presidential nominee was prepared to incite a
legitimacy crisis rather than accept that he’s lost to a woman.

As always with
Trump, the temptation is to interpret this apostasy through the lens of
individual psychology. . . . Yet such a personalized account of Trump’s
behavior has the effect of letting his political party and his supporters off
the hook. Not just for supporting him, but for sharing his grim view of
American democracy.

Public-opinion
polling shows that Trump’s low opinion of American elections has practically
become Republican Party orthodoxy. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on
Friday, Republicans have an “unprecedented” level of “concern and mistrust in
the system.” Roughly 70 percent of Republicanvoters believe that if
Hillary Clinton wins the election, it’ll be due to fraud.

This
suspicious Republican electorate is joined by growing ranks of conservative
politicians, pundits, and intellectuals. They’re all increasingly willing to
say that the existing American political system is hopelessly flawed and needs
to be rolled back to the days before blacks and women could vote. On the most
obvious level, this can be seen in moves by Republican governors all over
America to make voting more difficult, through stringent voting ID laws, new
hurdles to registration, and the curtailment of early-voting options. Equally
significant has been the gutting of key provisions of the Voting Rights Act by
conservative Supreme Court justices in the 2013 Shelby Country v. Holder ruling.

But
these overt forms of voting suppression are merely the most visible manifestations
of a larger questioning of democracy on the political right. Trump’s
anti-democratic rhetoric—and the eagerness of so many good, white patriotic
Americans to cheer it and believe it—is a symptom of the larger trend on the
political right toward doubting the legitimacy of the American system.

Suspicion
of the democratic system is so pervasive on the right because it’s driven by
the fear that white Christian America is facing demographic doom. The evidence
is right there in the election results: Republicans have lost the popular vote
in five of the last six presidential elections, and if current polling trends
hold, the GOP will be batting one for seven when the results come in on
November 8. Thanks to gerrymandering, Republicans may hold on to a U.S. House
majority for a while, and they’ll remain competitive in state capitols in the
near future. But a whites-only party can’t win national elections. And over
time, the GOP’s congressional and state fortresses will crumble if the party
doesn’t change dramatically. Or if the democratic system doesn’t change
dramatically.

[S]ome
leading religious conservatives have a different worry: the loss of Christian
cultural hegemony. Back in 1999, First Things, a journal of the
religious right, hosted a symposium called “The End of Democracy?” that was a
precursor of things to come. Prominent Christians and Jews thrashed out the
argument that American courts were so relentlessly secular that the entire
political system might have to be overthrown. This was radical stuff. As editor
Richard John Neuhaus wrote, “The question
here explored, in full awareness of its far-reaching consequences, is whether
we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no
longer give moral assent to the existing regime.”

Over the last
few years, it’s become evident that the First Things symposium was no
outlier, but rather an early symptom of the religious right starting to think
outside the American political system for solutions. More recently, a virtual
Vladimir Putin cult has arisen among religious conservatives longing for a
return to cultural purity. Putin’s macho bearing, his hostility to LGBT rights,
and his fusion of nationalism with support for the Russian Orthodoxy all make
him an attractive figure to right-wing Christians disenchanted with Obama’s
socially liberal America.

Franklin
Graham, heir to the most influential American evangelist, says Putin should be celebrated for taking
“a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay
and lesbian agenda,” even as “America’s own morality has fallen so far on this
issue.” Rush Limbaugh cheers Putin for
opposing “a full-frontal assault on what has always been considered normalcy.”
Religious Right stalward Bryan Fischer, host of the radio program Focal Point,
has hailed Putin as a “lion of Christianity.”
Sam Rohrer, president of the America Pastors Network, calls the Russian
president “the moral leader of the world.”

Beyond
this election, beyond even the fate of the Republican Party, there is a
significant minority of Americans who are giving up on democracy because it
doesn’t serve their purpose of upholding a white Christian patriarchy. Trump is
merely a symptom of this problem, and even if he fades as a political force
after the election, the underlying disease will remain, and indeed will likely
spread. The threat to the American system is not an armed revolt after November
8, but the growing number of Americans who are convinced that only “regime
change” can save capitalism, Christianity, and America itself.

On a somewhat related note, the Boston Globe has a good piece on the Christofascists' backing of Trump and the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy that has been exposed. The piece is here and deserves a full read.

I have often argued that the goal of today's GOP has been to somehow turn the clock back to the 1950's when, according to the party base's view, everything was golden and perfection. Unless, of course one is black, Hispanic, a woman, LGBT and/or non-religious. Indeed, everything that has made America a more equal society is viewed as bad by Trumpkins who long for unchallenged white privilege and a time when open bigotry was more acceptable. A piece in Salon looks new poll findings and at the troubling world view of Trump's base of support. It is an indictment of what the GOP has become and the ugliness that it has long cultivated. Now, it has spun out of control. Here are article excerpts:

If you ever had
the sneaking suspicion that “Make America Great Again” was code for “Turn
America’s clock back to the 1950s,” a new poll suggests you were absolutely
right.

According to a survey published by
the Public Religion Research Institute, 72 percent of likely voters
supporting Donald Trump say America has changed for the worst since the 1950s.
By contrast, 70 percent of likely voters supporting Hillary Clinton say
that America has changed for the better since that decade.

Not
surprisingly, these findings are also sharply divided based on racial lines.
While 56 percent of white Americans say America has changed for the worse since
the 1950s, 62 percent of African-Americans and 57 percent of Hispanic Americans
say that it has changed for the better.

That said, 56
percent of college-educated white Americans also believe that America has
changed for the better since the 1950s; 65 percent of white Americans without
college degrees say that it has not.

The group that
most yearns for the 1950s? White evangelical Protestants, 74 percent of whom
think things have gotten worse.

Across the
board, the study found that Democrats were more likely to care about social
justice issues than Republicans. . . . 61 percent of Democrats said race
relations mattered to them personally compared to only 31 percent of
Republicans.

Sixty-three percent
of Democrats believe that immigrants strengthen American society, whereas 73
percent of Republicans say that immigrants threaten American customs and
values.

Finally, 77
percent of Democrats say that America would benefit from more women serving in
political leadership roles, a sentiment 62 percent of Republicans disagree
with.

The 1950s is a
decade closely associated with the Cold War, McCarthy era witch hunts, and
violent backlash to the civil rights movement. Although not explicitly
incorporated in the themes of Trump’s campaign, the Republican nominee’s
critics have long noted that “Make America Great Again” could be viewed as
a dog whistle for a return to an era before our society’s major strides in
racial and gender equality.

[The] message
where ‘I’ll give you America great again’ is if you’re a white Southerner, you
know exactly what it means, don’t you?”

Note how southern evangelical Christians lead the way in longing for the bad old days of the 1950's. The remain among the most selfish and self-centered people (and racist) and display a contempt for the Gospel message they claim to support by their opposition to equality and social justice. They should not be welcome in polite and decent society.

Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker is off the GOP reservation again, this time writing a column that places the blame for Donald Trump's rise and the metastasizing cancer within the Republican Party at the feet of the Republican National Committee ("RNC") which sold out to Trump or allowed themselves to be suckered and played for fools. The indictment, while certainly true, also applies far down the GOP's party structure and began years ago when those who should never have been elected to local party committees or allowed to win nominations were welcomed instead of being firmly rejected if not openly condemned. Trump is merely the logical extension of a failure of leadership that applies up and down the party hierarchy. Short turn opportunism and a refusal to reject extremists of all stripes - and a refusal to face objective reality - are what set the GOP on its march to insanity. Here are column highlights:

Perhaps the strongest
indicator that Trump will lose is his own premature distribution of blame. As
far as he is concerned, defeat couldn’t be his fault.

The obvious truth is that Trump never should have been the
Republican nominee, as even Trump probably would admit. When he descended the
escalator to announce his candidacy, he was at just 1 percent — a barely
perceptible speck on the continuum of Republican candidates.

He was ignored — or at least not taken seriously — by nearly
everyone for good reason. And when he started spouting hot rhetoric, few in the
GOP leadership worried much since he’d surely be moving along any day. This was
not to be, in part because, as Trump commented laughing to a friend, who told
me: “I had no idea it would be so easy.”

Translation: Once he realized he was dealing with a bunch of
suckers, he continued to play them. What fun — and, voila.

The suckers of whom he was speaking are the party leadership,
specifically: Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and RNC
communications director Sean Spicer. If these names don’t ring a bell,
congratulations, you don’t watch TV. Because Priebus, when not jetting around
with Trump on his gold-plated private plane, and Spicer are on one talk show or
another nearly every time you look at a cable news screen. They’ve worn more
makeup the past year than most women do in a lifetime.

They’re the
elephants in the green room, in other words. Everyone sees them clearly but
manages to avoid speaking openly of the obvious — that Priebus has presided over
the ruin of the Republican Party. Why isn’t he being held accountable? Why
isn’t he being called to the mat for allowing Trump’s rise, which might not
have been possible had the party chair done his job?

Why was everyone willing to stand by and watch this
reality-TV character take charge?

“Because [Priebus] is their boy,” a disgruntled top
Republican told me. “He’s given them what they wanted. He’s kept the money
flowing.”

The RNC gang
sold out. When Trump launched his campaign by ranting about undocumented
Mexicans as murderers and rapists, the party leadership should have shouted him
down. Priebus should have summoned Trump to Washington and explained how things
were going to go. He might have handed Trump theGOP’s autopsy reportfrom the 2012 election and referred
him to the “Hispanics” section of the chapter on cultivating “Demographic
Partners,” saying: This is what you’re going to do from now on.

Would Trump have agreed? Probably not. But then Priebus
should have said: Well, then, I’ll have to break you down during the primaries.
At every opportunity, Priebus should have made the case that Trump, who
eventually alienated not just Hispanics but also African Americans and women,
doesn’t represent the Republican Party. Instead, Priebus and others feared a
base that hadn’t formed around Trump yet and, by their inaction, contributed to
Trump’s success.

By letting Trump rise to the top, as oil slicks tend to,
Priebus has left the party in such a gelatinous mess Republicans will need a
hazmat team to clean it up. And for this, he’d like to serve a third term?

One of the much noted aspects of Donald trump's candidacy is the manner in which it has helped mainstream white nationalists and other elements seeking to restore a white conservative Christian America and bring them out from the fringes of the Republican Party. Sadly, much of the GOP base seemingly has wildly embraced Trump and his message of racial division and hatred. Republican apologists try to claim that Trump has not openly courted the support of these elements, but as a long piece in Politico lays out, Trump has consistently sent dog whistle and coded messages to those with white nationalist and KKK ties and ideology. The messaging - which white nationalists see as being denied with a wink and a nod - has been too consistent to have been inadvertent or by mistake on the part of Trump, his surrogates and his campaign. As for Republicans who aren't racists (or who claim not to be), it would seem to be time for them to evacuate from the GOP's sinking ship. Here are highlights from Politico:

The embrace of Donald Trump by
America’s white nationalists has been one of the most surprising and unsettling
threads in the 2016 campaign. The celebrity New York developer has been
endorsed by the nation’s most prominent neo-Nazis, as well as both current and former Klansmen. He
is supported online by a legion of racist
and anti-Semitic trolls, who push his
campaign’s message and viciously attack journalists and politicians they see as
hostile to Trump.

How did the scattered legions of American white supremacists coalesce around a
showboating New York mogul? I tracked this two-year evolution through thousands
of posts and comments on scores of blogs and forums used by the most
ideological racists. What these posts show is the story of a U.S. presidential
candidate who slowly but relentlessly overcame widespread distrust and
contempt, as white nationalists came to believe he was their
candidate—or at least the best candidate they could realistically expect.

Perhaps surprisingly, it wasn’t
Trump’s initial campaign announcement about Mexican “rapists” that cemented his
support: It was his steady, consistent push for an anti-immigration platform,
one of the central policy pillars of the nationalist right. And as
white-nationalists began to rally around Trump as its closest political ally in
a generation, they began to detect what members called “wink-wink-wink”
communications from the candidate. There was his retweet of bogus murder
statistics that exaggerated black crime; two separate retweets of a racist
Twitter feed called @WhiteGenocideTM; and the interview that sealed the deal:
the moment on CNN when—just days before the Louisiana primary—Trump dodged the
question of whether to repudiate the endorsement of former Ku Klux Klan leader
David Duke, which one commenter on the white nationalist site Stormfront called
“the best political thing I have seen in my life.”

Whether the white nationalist
community’s embrace of Trump was the result of a conscious strategy on the
campaign’s part, some sort of accident or something in between, it led to a
show of unified support unprecedented for a modern major-party nominee. Even as
Trump supporters argue that the candidate isn’t a racist, when it comes to the
white-power movement itself, there’s no question how they see it: More than in
any other modern presidential campaign, they believe they’re receiving clear
and frequent signals of support.

[T]heir
attitudes toward Republican candidates largely have been ambivalent, with many
opting out of politics altogether. Now, with Trump, that has changed, raising
the prospect that the nominee of a major political party is tapping a deep well
of anti-Semitism and racial hate—intentionally or unintentionally—and is mainstreaming such views
in the process.

If Trump wins the election,
subscribers to those views believe, they will be able to claim increased
legitimacy and seek a bigger role in mainstream politics. And even if he loses,
as looks more likely, they may be in a better position than ever to claim a
stake in future presidential elections—perhaps even to field a candidate of
their own four years from now.

Announcing his candidacy at Trump
Tower in June 2015, Trump memorably said
illegal Mexican immigrants were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime.
They’re rapists.” With that line, he threw red meat to the white nationalist
crowd from the very start of his presidential campaign, but it would take some
time for that crowd to believe that Trump was sincere in his rhetoric.

The first white nationalist leader to formally endorse Trump appears to have
been Andrew Anglin, an
avid online activist who came up through the racist depths of the alt-right,
via the 4chan forum, to found a popular neo-Nazi website, the Daily Stormer. In late June 2015, Anglin
wrote that he didn’t think Trump could ever beat Hillary Clinton in the general
election. But he saw reason for hope in Trump’s rising poll numbers. “I urge
all readers of this site to do whatever they can to make Donald Trump
President,” Anglin wrote in June.

Trump refused to back down from his
controversial remarks about Hispanics, winning plaudits from white nationalists
for his defiance of “political correctness” in the face of criticism from business partners and
fellow Republicans.

Trump was surging in the polls
“because he is not on his knees before Mexico and Mexican immigrants,” said
Jared Taylor of the influential white nationalist website American Renaissance,
which under the guise of “race realism” attempts to put an intellectual face on
white nationalism.

At first, there were only tenuous
reasons to think Trump was even aware of the white nationalist debate over his
suitability for their cause. In July 2015, Trump had tweeted an image showing a
stock photo of Nazi S.S. soldiers where American soldiers should have been. The
Trump campaign blamed an intern for the mistake,
and the incident faded quickly from the mainstream press. But white
nationalist observers saw something different.

“Obviously, most people will be like
‘obvious accident, no harm done,’” Anglin wrote on the Daily Stormer.
“Meanwhile, we here at the Daily Stormer will be all like ‘wink wink wink wink
wink.’”

[H]is would soon become a pattern:
Trump would promulgate messages with racist cues (some more subtle, some less
so), then deny or disavow them, while the white nationalist community dutifully
perked up and saw those messages as a call to arms.

In November, for example, the
candidate retweeted a graphic showing false statistics
vastly exaggerating black crime. White nationalists responded enthusiastically,
even as they themselves acknowledged the statistics were false. The graphic was
later traced back to a white nationalist on Twitter.

Some white nationalists went so far
as to goad the candidate into sending racist signals. In late 2015,a
social media campaign called The White Genocide Project began directing tweets
to the candidate over Twitter. . . . . In late January, Trump took the bait, retweeting a message
that had been directed to him from a user with the handle “@WhiteGenocideTM.”
While the content of the tweet was relatively innocuous (a light jab at Jeb
Bush), the user’s account was filled with anti-Semitic content and linked to a
revisionist biography of Adolf Hitler.
Within a few days, Trump retweeted
@WhiteGenocideTM a second time, and two more “white genocide”-oriented users
soon after that. (The campaign did not respond to
media requests for comment on the tweets at the time.)

“Whereas the odd White genocide
tweet could be a random occurrence, it isn’t statistically possible that two of
them back to back could be a random occurrence,” wrote Daily Stormer’s Anglin.
“It could only be deliberate. There is no way that this could be anything other
than both a wink-wink-wink and a call for more publicity on his campaign.”

In February, the hammer finally fell. On his online radio program, recorded the
day of Trump’s victory in the Nevada caucuses, Duke credited Trump with
energizing white nationalists, and effectively endorsed him, imploring voters
in that state to turn out. “You have an absolute obligation to vote for Donald
Trump, and to vote against Cruz and Rubio,” Duke said. “If you vote for Ted
Cruz, you are acting in a traitorous way to our people. You are betraying our
people. Period.” He cautioned that he didn’t agree with everything Trump said,
but argued, “Trump is the only chance we really have right now to make a dent,
plus Trump is waking up our people and energizing our people across America.”

After Duke’s endorsement, most other
white nationalist leaders fell in line.

With a long and persistent series of
racial cues, Trump had won the benefit of the doubt from the white nationalist
community. In the wake of the CNN interview, a new consensus emerged in that
community: Trump was secretly sympathetic to white nationalism, to a greater or
lesser degree, and anything he said that contradicted the goals of the movement
could be dismissed as an expediency, necessary to get elected. Many white
nationalists commenting online thought he actually needed to be more careful
about concealing his supposed beliefs in order to advance through the election.
When Trump suggested in August
2016 that Second Amendment supporters might have to redress his potential
electoral loss to Clinton, Ryan said it was a “joke gone bad,” while
Stormfronters cheered and mocked the “pearl-clutching media.” By the time Trump
hired the founder of the alt-right news site Breitbart as his campaign CEO and
Donald Trump Jr. tweeted racist memes featuring Skittles and Pepe the Frog in the
fall, party leaders could hardly be bothered to keep up. The steady stream of
provocations kept white nationalists supportive and stimulated.

So they were primed when, in a
speech in Florida last week, Trump blasted “those who control the
levers of power in Washington, and … the global special interests.” He accused
Clinton of conspiring with “international banks to plot the destruction of U.S.
sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers.”

For many Americans, these references
might seem merely paranoid. But the hard-won, faithful white nationalist
converts to Trumpism had heard and used these terms for
decades. And they had a clear idea what their candidate’s words meant.

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Out gay attorney in a committed relationship; formerly married and father of three wonderful children; sometime activist and political/news junkie; survived coming out in mid-life and hope to share my experiences and reflections with others.
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